Politics and tech

When did anyone last bother reading a company's terms and conditions? The web security company F-Secure decided to find out by offering free WiFi in central London with one catch – the so-called “Herod clause”. Buried deep in legal jargon, the terms of service said that if you wanted to get a decent internet connection you'd had to give up your first born. In total, six people agreed to hand over their child.

The stunt handily demonstrates the fact that hardly anyone bothers to read the terms that they are agreeing to, so desperate are they for fast internet access. If you dig deep… Read More

Strange but true – lots of countries, including Ireland, France and Turkey ban polling in the run-up to elections. Given our experience this week of polling in the Scottish independence referendum, I think we should follow suit.

Picking an example from the air, one poll showing the Yes vote nudging ahead sent the Westminster numpties into a massive spin, and ended up with them promising all sorts of plums to the Scottish electorate. Never mind that’s the only poll that has ever had Yes ahead: never mind that it’s the views of a couple of thousand people extrapolated to 4 million, never mind this is a genuinely unprecedented event; one poll… Read More

A British man spouts nonsense in front of a camera, does something incredibly stupid, becomes an internet video hit. It happens every couple of months, but never before in a way that’s done so much to impact policy as the “Isil” murder videos.

Whether you want to or not, you can’t avoid the images of the beheadings of US journalists and UK aid workers in the last couple of weeks. The murderer, “Jihadi John”, as we’ve taken to calling him, is doubtless pleased with his notoriety, with the fact he's graced the front pages of newspapers back in the UK. However, the truth is, if you’re the man actually cutting off heads for an audience, you aren’t very important.

The dark net. It sounds quite terrifying – and, having written a book on the subject, I can tell you that it often is. It’s shorthand to describe the hidden and encrypted part of the internet beyond the reach of normal browsers, accessible using an anonymous browser called Tor. It's protected by a clever traffic encryption system which makes it very difficult to locate the servers which host sites – called Tor Hidden Services – and the IP addresses of the people the visit them.

Even through Tor was originally a US government research project created to help protect the anonymity of its agents,… Read More

Over the last few days, intimate pictures of hundreds of female celebrities have been stolen from file storage "in the cloud". Some of these pictures have since been published online.

While some have suggested a breach in Apple’s iCloud storage, the truth is probably more grubby than that. Computer security experts that I’ve spoken to have cited the sheer number and variety of sources for the images as indicative of something more complex and sinister. Some suspect an individual working in a data centre amassed the images over time, and was then hacked himself; others that there was a hack or exploit of the wifi… Read More

“I’m using Facebook to target various nationalist-related groups and inviting every single member [to become a my Facebook friend] … aaaaarrrrggh:/ It’s driving me nuts, lol”, wrote Anders Breivik in his rambling 1,516-page manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. "Ofc, it’s a quite tedious task," he admitted, "but then again, I can’t think of a more efficient way to get in direct touch with nationalists in all European countries."

After emailing 2083 to hundreds of people whose email addresses he’d harvested from Facebook groups, Breivik left his house and killed 77 people in a terrorist attack. Large chunks of his manifesto were copied and pasted from the net… Read More

Yesterday, the American company Ratheon was awarded £224 million of British taxpayers' money for a disastrous Home Office IT project called e-Borders. That £224 million represents less than half the total bill of the project, which was scrapped last year.

I thought I had lost my capacity to be shocked by IT projects going wrong, but the e-Borders system is probably the most abject failure I have ever written about.

After all, these failures are a regular occurrence. When writing about another failed Home Office immigration system last month (which left us with a bill of £350 million), I pointed out that 40 per… Read More

Today, the Telegraph’s Matt Holehouse broke the story that the government is intending to link up all the information it has about us into one “Big Data” system. It hopes to use it to “copy sophisticated customer analysis techniques developed by retailers such as Amazon and Tesco to develop a significantly more 'intelligent', 'nimble' and cheaper state.”

Obviously, this has rung alarm bells in some quarters. Understandably some people are worried about their data being sliced up and pored over by civil servants – it all feels a bit 1984. I think there’s a residual fear, created by the fact… Read More

"Oh nothing, just watching you while you type, is that weird for you?"

For all the worries about Big Brother snaffling our personal data, it turns out that we are more worried by Little Brother – and starting to change our behaviour as a result.

A brand new poll of over 2,000 Brits released yesterday by Ipsos-Mori and the Royal Statistical Society has found that British citizens trust internet companies less than the Government when it comes to handling our data. Fifty-four per cent have low trust in internet companies (second only to the media/press). By contrast, only 26 per cent have low trust in the police,… Read More

While I was phoning around this morning for an explanation to why the Government’s latest big IT project has ended with £350 million being flushed down the lavatory, one respected contractor told me: “I just don’t think the UK government should be allowed to buy IT at all. Maybe give them abacuses, but they could still get those wrong.”

It’s not just a problem for the UK either. Most nations – but especially the USA – have a woeful record when it comes to IT procurement. Here’s a list of the seven most expensive IT failures in US government history – and that wa… Read More